The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [60]
As Literature
One final way we might track the “what is / what isn’t literature” question is via the use of as in the title of a college course or a program in reading. Take, for instance, the familiar and apparently innocent phrase “the Bible as literature.” What is the implication of that little word as? Well, for one thing, it implies that there is another way of reading (the Bible as revealed truth; the Bible as moral philosophy). For the Bible, this is arguably a loaded question. Which Bible? Which translation? The Hebrew Bible plus the New Testament?
Many significant works of English and American poetry and prose allude to verses or persons mentioned in the Bible, so it makes sense that the English Bible or some other way of describing the Bible as literature should be offered as a course at schools and colleges. But the same can be said of Greek and Roman mythology, which, if taught, is not usually tagged with as literature. “The Bible as literature” is both an inclusion and an exclusion, an acknowledgment of literary influence and literary style, and a bracketing of the question of belief. None of which is completely satisfying, either to believers or to nonbelievers. Reading the Bible as literature, teachers of such courses explain, may involve using reading strategies drawn from such diverse interpretive practices as formalism, post-structuralism, cultural hermeneutics, etc. As one instructor wrote in a memo for prospective students, “Studying the Bible as Literature does not mean that we insist the text (Old Testament) is a series of fables or that it is patently false. Similarly, this way of reading the Bible does not insist that the Old Testament is a document that is historically true in the scientific, strict sense of the phrase. Rather, we are seeking a literary understanding of ‘truth.’ ”62
Perhaps predictably, Allan Bloom singled out “the Bible as literature” in The Closing of the American Mind as an indication of “the impotence of the humanities,” suggesting that to “to include [the Bible] in the humanities is already a blasphemy, a denial of its own claims,” and that teaching the Bible as literature rather than “as Revelation” makes it possible for it to be read as a secular document, “as we read, for example, Pride and Prejudice.” For Bloom, the professors who taught classic texts, among which he includes the Bible, were not interested in the “truth” of those texts.63 Presumably, the idea of “a literary understanding of ‘truth’ ” would have struck him as fallacious.
The phrase as literature has also been used in other contexts, like, for example, “film as literature,” once a legitimating move that explained or justified why courses on film were included in the curricula of literature departments. When methods of film analysis moved away from this paradigm and closer to visual, historical, and philosophical analysis—and as film studies established itself as a humanities discipline in its own right—as literature tended to drop away, sometimes replaced by the more anodyne and, which often denoted a comparison between specific works of literature and specific films or film genres. On the other hand, “Freud as literature” or “Marx as literature” or “Darwin as literature” suggests that a body of work associated with another discipline or subject area will be read according to protocols designed for, and effective in analyzing, literary works. In the case of Marx and Freud, at least, it sometimes comes with an unspoken subtext, implying that as literature is a fallback or secondary framework, and that the analysis of these writers has come